So this guy, he goes Googling for the name of a song he’s listening to at the time. The song’s called “Ball and Chain.” Turns out the top Google result for that phrase is, well, the ex-wife’s blog.

And then he and his buddy notice something. Namely, that my website domain bears a striking resemblance to, well, his buddy’s own domain.

And then, and boy do I know how to tell a story, he emails me (and his buddy) about it. We’ve been exchanging semi-snarky email for the last few hours, out of which has come the fact that he works for a radio station cluster in a geek-based role. Who’d have thunk it?

So what do you think? Does this mean I have a spiritual twin out there somewhere in the wilds of Minnesota? Or is he my Bizarro-world doppelganger? Or is he just another guy who identifies with colorless waterfowl?

You be the judge! (I’ll be the jury, he can be the executioner!)

I was browsing through recent entries at collision detection, and in a comments thread found The Mini-Mizer.

Then I used it for evil. And by “evil” I mean “geeky fannish purposes.”

(That’s supposed to be Edward Elric of Fullmetal Alchemist. Or, as close an approximation as the Mini-Mizer could provide. Heh.)

Yes, yes, you’re all laughing at me. I’m used to it…

I’ve been working sporadically on a computer project at home, one designed to provide a means of viewing video files (specifically digisubbed anime, but other files as well) on the 32” TV in the living room. Towards that end I’ve been fighting with the proprietary ATI Radeon drivers for Linux. Oh, I’ve sort of made them work, but they’re quirky and forgetful and a major PITA to work with.

This evening I was looking through my boxes for slide rails with which to mount the Livedrive bay unit into the machine in question when I came across an old piece of video hardware: My old Canopus Pure3D II. It’s a 3dfx Voodoo2 accelerator card from back before all video cards did 2D and 3D combined.

It also sports S-Video and composite outputs.

Turns out, it is also natively supported in modern Linux distributions. Well, isn’t that handy?

I dropped that critter into the chassis (along with the Livedrive, since the slide rails I needed were in the same box as the Canopus card) and, after surprisingly little futzing around, managed to generate signal out of the S-Video port. It took a few tries to find a screen resolution and refresh rate that would generate a useful signal, but even that only took up about twenty minutes.

On a side note, I also used apt to perform a massive upgrade on my Fedora Core 1 install. In this instance, the ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ command resulted in almost 150 package downloads. Wow.

Anyway, my next step is to see if I can manage 800×600 out of the S-Video port, and then I get to start setting up software. If all goes well, by this time next week I’ll have a working multimedia computer down in the living room. Excellent!

The latest firestorm to hit the so-called “blogosphere” is the Movable Type 3.0 licensing debacle. I have the good fortune to enjoy considerable distance from the fray: The only MT site I run is the anime site. (By the way, has anybody come up with a better name for that thing? Anyone?) Sure, it has two authors, but unless some major security fix comes down the wire that necessitates an upgrade, I can leave it right where it is. The only two other MT-based sites I’m involved with (by way of hosting) are single-author, single-blog rigs, thus falling under the “personal use” heading. And that’s even if they wanted to upgrade to 3.0, which isn’t exactly what you’d call a certainty.

Have I pointed out that the Monaural Jerk v0.5 alpha releases have been an absolute joy to work with? Heh. (Oh, I should also mention that the roomie swears by WordPress and its “five minutes from tarball to working site” slickness.)

Recently I heard the somewhat sad, somewhat frustrating story of juvenile misconduct during a convention. This is not that story. This is part of the commentary after the story.

Several levels of crisis were described in acronym form, being from least to worst:

SNAFU – Situation Normal, All F***ed Up

Sure, everyone’s heard of that one.

TARFU – Things Are Really F***ed Up

New to me, but okay…

FUBAR – F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition (or, alternately, Repair)

A ubiquitous piece of work, that. And then the one that really got me laughing…

BOHICA – Bend Over, Here It Comes Again

Hah! It’s so much fun to say! I can so see that entering the common lexicon in my particular circle of friends…

As part of my overall push to become the premier hostmaster for Monaural Jerk-based blogs, I finally managed to upgrade Wendi’s site today. The only hitch in the process was on account of a category name change at some point in the history of her site. The rest was fairly straightforward, and the results are rather spiffy if I do say so myself.

Ball and Chain